Professor Jen Ziemke, (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison), is a Crisis Mapping Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and Assistant Professor of International Relations at John Carroll University (JCU). Professor Ziemke is one of the leading scholars in the field of crisis mapping. Her research applies spatial and temporal econometric analysis, dynamic visualization, and in-depth historical and archival research to develop unique crisis maps that reveal underlying conflict processes. She recently employed these techniques to carry out the most comprehensive data-driven study of the Angolan civil war ever produced. For this project, she coded and geo-referenced some 10,000 conflict events spanning all 41 years of this violent war using hundreds of sources and a detailed exhumation of Portuguese newspaper archives. Not only is this dataset the world’s most comprehensive dataset on the Angolan civil war, it is one of the largest and most detailed micro-level conflict datasets available in the field of crisis mapping.
Together with Patrick Meier, Jen is the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM) and the co-organizer of the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM) series. ICCM 2009, the inaugural conference of the series, was a defining event that helped shape and advance the new field of crisis mapping. For more information, please see the official conference website and coverage from the news media. Jen teaches courses on conflict processes, African politics, crisis mapping, spatial thinking in the social sciences, international security, and other courses in international relations. She was also a fellow at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) and continues her work as a volunteer for Amnesty International, USA as Angola and Namibia country specialist. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer on the Namibian side of the Angolan border from 1997-1999.